A Pilgrimage to Eternity

by Timothy Egan

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  I DOUBT THAT THE OX immortalized atop the towers of Laon’s cathedral would have survived a contemporary vetting process. The cathedral is a colossus of creative persistence, an early Gothic masterpiece dating to 1150. Like the city, it’s full of light, exuding a cheery glow throughout its impressively long and superbly symmetrical nave. There are no saintly body parts or scraps from the heaven-sent that I can see. It’s not pickled in the past, or haunted like so many of Europe’s largest holy palaces.

  Today, a priest is hearing confession. His flag is up—the light is on in the confessional. It’s been, mmmmm . . . many decades since I last tallied up my misdeeds for a stranger in a clerical collar behind a screen. On impulse, I decide to unload a truck bed of sins and ask le prêtre for forgiveness. If I wait any longer, I’ll lose my nerve. I go inside the tiny enclosure and close the curtain.

  “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. My last confession—”

  “Qu’est-ce que c’est?”

  “Mon . . . confession, Father.”

  “Mais je ne parle pas anglais.”

  “Et moi . . . je ne parle pas bien français.”

  “Au revoir.”

  “Merci!”

  I settle for a pilgrim stamp on my V.F. passport. Near the exit is a small side shrine to a thirteenth-century juggler named Jo, who scandalized clerics of the cathedral with his bawdy sayings while performing before a statue of the Virgin. They banished him from Laon. But then the mother of Christ appeared, shaming the men of the church for ousting Mary’s entertainment. Jo now has his own place in the church. The juggler’s tale is the quirkiest miracle of Laon, and you have to wonder how it made the cut. But again, I’m glad it did. A little whimsy is not a bad thing among the miraculous.

  At dusk, the ramparts of Laon are still warm to the touch, holding the Picardy sun well after the walls have been overtaken by shadows. The plaza is full of life. Dinner outside at a small bistro is duck with cherry tomatoes on top. It is perfectly presented, burnished in buttery twilight. It’s well past nine p.m., and yet the west façade of the cathedral is aglow with the loveliest part of the longest days of the year. The church is like a totem pole, in that each layer tells a story. The first floor is a crowd of Gothic characters, feudal lords lost to the years, their heads intact. The second is dominated by an expansive rose of glass, circles within a circle, which allows ample sun into the cathedral. Next are arches, each a perfect match of the other, beneath a Virgin Mary holding the Christ child. The towers rise above it all, with the miracle ox. At the very top are nasty-faced gargoyles. They represent the seven deadly sins—pride, envy, sloth, anger, gluttony, greed, and lust—and stare accusingly down at the former bishop’s palace, where many an overfed cleric indulged in all of the above.

  I want to hold this moment, this hour, this day, like the dawn walk out of Wisques. Back when the serfs of Laon were laboring over this cathedral, the everyday was mostly miserable. Today, it can seem miraculous, something my father tried to teach me. Though my dad suffered through plenty of disappointments, though he was raised without a father of his own, living above a bar on the South Side of Chicago, he was barely bruised by life’s poundings. The smallest things could make him happy—a trait that eludes many of the wealthiest and smartest among us. He once found a pair of used shoes at a thrift store—“Rockports! Do you realize how much these would normally cost?” Already broken in, and didn’t smell. He’d lose his ass in bingo at the church gym but come home happy because he laughed all night with nuns who drank him under the table. Neil Diamond’s songs could make him weep. Watching him die, as with watching him live, I learned a lot.

  But as it turns out, I need something more on this stop along the road to Rome. I have an ulterior motive for investigating miracles. My sister-in-law is struggling through late-stage cancer. She’s far too young, too vibrant, too full of fresh ideas, with too many songs still to teach her piano students. She is known in Los Angeles as the Piano Teacher to the Stars. When Holly Hunter won her Best Actress Oscar for The Piano, it was Margie Balter who taught her how to play. She doesn’t smoke. She swims every day. She rarely drinks. Her diet is fruit, vegetables, bagels, and the occasional burger. Why her? Her mother is 102, born when World War I still raged and Woodrow Wilson was president; she’s in good health. For months, Margie felt terrible and weak, with no appetite and powerful headaches. A scan showed cause for concern. A biopsy confirmed the worst. When they cut her open, they found tumorous growths in eleven different organs. The cancer is eating her up. She’s in constant pain. She can’t sleep or even find a position in bed that’s comfortable. She’s been bombarded with radiation and poisoned with chemo until she cannot sit up or hold down a few sips of a milk shake. The oncologists have almost killed her, in the perverse way of modern cancer treatment, while trying to save her. She’s open to any alternative therapies that she can qualify for, but her medical team has told her to close out her affairs. Her cancer is stage IV.

  Though the doctors may soon give up on her, my wife, Joni, will not. The sisters are inseparable, as they have been for life. What happens to one is felt by the other. In a hurry, Joni has dropped everything and become cancer literate, an instant expert in the awful details of her sister’s sarcoma. She has used her journalistic Rolodex, and all of her powers of persuasion, to get phone calls and emails returned from some of the best cancer docs in the United States. But nothing is working. We find ourselves desperate, wondering what else is out there. And I find myself, as with so many pilgrims on this road over the last thousand years, in need of a miracle. If that sounds expedient, last minute, an opportunistic misuse of prayer, so be it. If it means suspending rational thought, consider it done. If there is a force that can produce the scientifically inexplicable, I will beg for it on bended knee. If there’s a power that can help a juggler, an ox tender, the seekers at Canterbury, the pleaders at Lourdes, the children of Saint-Omer, bring it. We need one more miracle out of Laon.

  NINE

  SLUTS AND SAINTS ALONG THE CHEMIN DES DAMES

  For a village of fewer than a thousand people, tiny Corbény has been trampled on by more history than some of the best-known cities of the world. The archers of England and the army of Napoleon grazed their horses nearby in pastures of poppy and tall grass, the same fields that were dug into trenches for the Great War. Many a newly crowned king and his mistress bedded down in this stop along the Chemin des Dames—the Way of the Ladies, a section of the V.F. named for the well-born women who came this way from Paris to Reims. But today, I’m only interested in the overnight stay of a single teenage girl who changed the world, an illiterate peasant from a small town: Joan of Arc. After walking thirteen miles on mostly flat roads with plenty of leafy canopies for shade, it gave me a chill to plop my tired ass down on a piece of ground next to a plaque honoring the national saint of France. Joan and Charles VII, the king who owed his crown to her, slept in Corbény on July 22, 1429, five days after his coronation in Reims. They were in separate quarters, for Joan the Maid wore her virginity as no other woman save the mother of Christ.

  I am here on the same day, May 30, that Joan was roasted at the stake—burned twice over after she was already dead, to ensure that nothing of her mortal remains would find its way into a cathedral reliquary. Her ashes were dumped in the Seine. The church authorities who pronounced her a harlot and a heretic, a sinner and fraud, a bloody tart and cross-dresser, did her one favor before they tied her to a pyre in the town of Rouen. They examined her carefully at the fortress where she was held and determined that she would take her virginity to the stake.

  But what if Joan had made love to one of the men who worshipped her? What if she had spent a night with a soldier impressed by the greatest woman warrior of Europe? “We were all in the straw together and sometimes I saw Joan prepare for the night,” wrote the Duke of Alençon. “Sometimes I looked at her breasts, which were b
eautiful. And yet I never had any carnal desire for her.” Would she still be a saint—with the sanctity given her in 1920 by the same church that condemned her to hell nearly five hundred years earlier? Not likely. For the story of Joan the Virgin is also the story of a faith trapped in logical and biological incongruities.

  One of the joys of sauntering along the Via Francigena is letting your mind loose for the same purpose. When you can stop thinking about shoulder straps rubbing deeper into your skin, crotch chafing, or how far it is to the next boulangerie, the open road is liberating. Something random and obscure pops up, leading to random and obscure thoughts. Wonderful. And so here we are on the Way of the Ladies, and those stray thoughts turn to sex—the obsession with it, the repression of it, the lack of free expression regarding it. As saturated as this walkway is with the artistic and spiritual glories of Christianity, it is also thick with evidence of a confused and conflicted view of sexuality.

  I don’t blame Jesus, not in the least. He refused to stone a woman accused of sexual immorality, saying only those without sins should cast a killing rock. In that bold act, he was implicitly rebuking an Old Testament command in Deuteronomy, which called on men to execute women who had sex before marriage. The first half of the Bible, for what it’s worth, is stuffed with stories of predatory patriarchs, wily prostitutes, and any number of revered men cavorting with women not their wives. It’s a mass of contradictions. Indulgent towns of Sodom and Gomorrah, bad. King Solomon and his 700 wives and 300 concubines, good. In his preaching, Christ condemned adulterous behavior, but otherwise said nothing in any of the four Gospels about whom you could love, or how you could love. He said nothing about sex between people of the same gender. He said nothing about the superiority of abstinence over experience, nothing about the who and how of coupling, the timing of when to have children and when to practice birth control, all the forbidden sex later codified in exhaustive detail by celibate men. For that, you can blame his more censorious followers, those eunuchs on high moral ground looking down, turning natural pleasure into unnatural guilt, stoking ignorance into perversion, and on and on, up to the present day, in which the authorities of the Catholic Church are still trying to legislate rules of the bedroom while their biggest problem is priests who molest children.

  In this part of France, the only woman more honored than Joan in statue or portraiture is Mary, whose name is given to nearly every cathedral. And Mary was likely not a perpetual virgin, as Catholics believe. I say that as a grade school graduate of Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. And I say that with some trepidation, having just asked the good woman’s son for help. But consider the evidence. Jesus never mentioned it. You would think the incarnated God, deploying the miraculous to convince skeptics of his earthly mission, might at least drop a hint that he came from supernatural stock. Born to a virgin! Try doing that on your own! Never said a word. It’s mentioned by others in Matthew and Luke, but does not come from the mouth of Christ. In the earliest accounts of his life, the Gospel of Mark or Paul’s letter to the Galatians, the mother of God is not specifically asexual. In two of the four Gospels, the origin story of Jesus is a complete mystery. He just appears, a fully grown thirty-year-old man, having spent too much time living at home with his parents. Even when he had a prompt to tell the story—after a woman shouted to him, “Blessed is the womb that bore you and the breasts at which you were nursed”—Jesus passed up the chance for a supernatural shout-out on behalf of his mother.

  Also, Jesus had an older brother, and possibly other siblings, in the view of a sizable number of scholars. The earliest nonbiblical account mentions “James, the brother of Jesus, the one they call the Messiah.” That was written by a Roman historian of the Jews, in the first century. “James, the Lord’s brother” is cited in Mark’s Gospel, very specifically within a family context, not a bro in Christ. Matthew quotes the reaction of those who heard Jesus preach early on: “Isn’t he the carpenter’s son? Isn’t Mary his mother, and aren’t James, Joseph, Simon and Judas his brothers?” James could have been Mary’s son out of wedlock or born to an earlier wife of Joseph who later died. Speaking of which—what does the Catholic Church make of Joseph, Mary’s husband? A long-suffering celibate? A good handyman there to fix the stone wall and haul out the fish bones, with nothing more than a peck on the cheek at night? Apparently so. Joseph never consummated his marriage to Mary; according to canon law, she was a virgin till death.

  Completing the sex-free family is Jesus. He’s a man, let’s not forget. A man in his prime. Attractive. Vigorous. Charismatic. He eats. He sleeps. He weeps. He sweats. He aspires. He gets angry. He gets thirsty. He gets tired. His feelings get hurt. But lust? Not part of the human package. Well, there was Mary Magdalene, the most interesting woman in the New Testament.

  The last century has been good for Ms. Magdalene, and bad for the attempt to scrub sex from the founding story of Christianity. In December 1945, a farmer made a globe-shaking discovery near Nag Hammadi, in Upper Egypt. While digging away at soft soil, the man hit a red earthenware jar, almost three feet in height. Inside were thirteen books, remarkably well preserved, the pages made of papyrus, the covers of leather. They were Coptic translations, about 1,500 years old, of original stories written in Greek, up to 1,900 years ago—the Gnostic Gospels, as they would be called. Of late, some scholars have suggested that the books predate the four canonical biographies of Christ in the New Testament. Taken as a whole, much of the newfound gospels read like Buddhism, with an emphasis on finding God within yourself. Some of it is wild stuff—sex orgies, talking snakes, and bizarre rituals. But then again, the Old Testament is about as lurid and violent a book as can be found anywhere in proper literary company. The main characters of some of the gnostic stories are basically those we’ve long known about—Christ and his apostles, his mother, and the other Mary—but with very different dialogue. There’s far less emphasis on sin and sex, and more on tolerance and finding a way to enlightenment.

  “These are the secret words which the living Jesus spoke,” begins the Gospel of Thomas. The most convention-defying revelation pertains to Mary Magdalene. The Gospel of Philip states, “The companion of the Savior is Mary Magdalene.” Jesus loved Mary “more than all the disciples and used to kiss her often on the mouth.” This last statement is hearsay, and also heresy to the gatekeepers of Christian orthodoxy. But who’s to say it has any less veracity than the spoken words transcribed from Matthew, Mark, John, and Luke? About two hundred years after the birth of Christ, a group of well-placed bishops and priests were to say. That is, they settled on a patriarchal view of the faith and dismissed the other interpretations as false. To be fair, they were up against many frauds and characters claiming a direct connection to the words of Christ. The early messiah racket had no small number of hucksters playing on the Jewish prophecy of a savior and the “secret” texts about his ministry. But if the Gnostic Gospels were just another fairy tale, posing no real threat to the conventional narrative, why the exhaustive attempt to bury them? As Christianity emerged from persecution and took hold in the Roman state, copies of these gospels were destroyed under civil authority, and people were imprisoned for being in possession of them. They were hidden underground in that earthenware jar to keep the alternative words of Christ from disappearing altogether.

  In the stories that most Christians were raised on, Mary Magdalene has a prominent role, the second most-mentioned woman in the New Testament—though it’s never implied that she might have been Christ’s lover. She was a person of independent means who helped out the working-class, largely illiterate apostles, a benefactor of sorts. She was always there in a pinch. In the Gospel of Mary, an earlier Gnostic discovery, Christ entrusts her with keeping his words alive among the disciples. She followed the Hebrew rebel from rural Galilee to Jerusalem, witnessed the lurid homicide of his crucifixion, and arrived at the tomb of Jesus just days after his death. The apostles were hiding. Not Mary Magdalene. Her intention was to
assure a proper Jewish burial for a man she loved. Instead, she found a big boulder rolled away. The risen Christ then appeared to Mary and told her to spread the news: He was back! She thought he was the gardener.

  “Woman, why are you crying?” said Jesus, according to John. “Who is it that you are looking for?”

  At the time, women had such low social status that their testimony was not admissible in courts. And yet, Jesus chose a woman to be the first witness to the greatest miracle and central event of Christianity. And it was another woman—unnamed in the Gospel—who was the only person ever to win an argument with Jesus, cajoling him into healing her daughter, as both Mark and Matthew tell it. How Mary Magdalene, one of the most trusted and loyal of all the early followers, came to be cast as a slut is central to the Catholic Church’s impoverishment of thought on half of humanity. Writing women and sex out of the story started with Saint Paul, an early celibate, whose letters became Scripture, if not statutes of the faith. “It is well for a man not to touch a woman,” he wrote to the Corinthians. “To the unmarried and the widows, I say that it is well for them to remain single as I do. But if they cannot exercise self-control, they should marry. For it is better to marry than be aflame with passion.” Married people can’t be aflame with passion? No, apparently not. And certainly not unmarried people. Passion is a forbidden fruit, though Paul had no directive from God on this, which he admits. “I do not have a command from the Lord, but I give my opinion as one who by the Lord’s mercy is worthy of trust.”